Angel Voices

Needing to be seen, I find my face

in the mirror and shave away the edge.

The lunatics on the street know me.

They whisper my secret name and splutter

profane histories that riff jagged chords

from out-of-tune wire. They beckon me to join

on bended knees and supplicate the God in you

at subway landings, our long greasy hair

draped over nugatory faces, neither male nor female,

our fingers hung like rotted fruit at the end

of dead tree limbs that beseech heaven

for pity, compassion, a stranger's stray dollar.

He hid under the covers and spoke

to the mother ship all night. At dawn,

he killed the dog and set the piano on fire.

The Others had come to take him home.

He spent months in the observation ward

and left with a pocket full

of antipsychotics and Gillespie

itching his finger tips with no way out.

They see one of their own in me, those lost

and despised. Like them, my past is one

long short-circuit of happiness. Their pain came

unasked, but mine played as perverse desire

to warm my self in its own burning ruins.

Criminally flawed, I'd bury my bone of deceit

in your chest and dig it out to chew on.

There's no crime I could not commit,

given the right circumstances.

When the meds milked his soul near empty,

the stars conjoined to tear him in two,

and his need to celebrate their harmony

so fated his blood, he quit eating the poison.

Lightning lost itself in the keys on the piano

and the chords of Gillespie spoke in angel voice

from the mother ship and mingled with mating songs

and drug deals in the dead end bar.

Dawn light on the Sangre de Christos ran red.

In the kingdom of the lost and insane,

the realm of saint and sinner, being seen

is not being seen, and not being seen

reveals our nothingness. Truth dies with you

in the grave and burns like an ember slowly

losing its glow. Only then do angel voices

open the gates of heaven or hell.

In the mirror, I shave away one more angle

to reveal yet another part of me that I might be or not.